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Tant: Surveillance has been commonplace in 'land of the free'

published Saturday, June 29, 2013

“If you don’t expect anything, you won’t be disappointed,” said the late, great activist historian Howard Zinn early in the Obama administration. The old “radical historian” must be grinning in his grave over the recent revelations of the latest round of government surveillance by the super-secret National Security Agency. Such sordid surveillance has gone on for decades under both Democratic and Republican administrations, but Republican conservatives who said nothing during the Bush/Cheney years of NSA spying with warrantless wiretaps are now in a state of high dudgeon when the same thing is happening under the White House regime of a black Democrat whom they despise.

During the what has been called “the American Century,” repression by government and spying on American citizens has been standard operating procedure no matter which political party occupies the White House. Early in the 20th century, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson was president of the United States, a “Red Scare” reign of terror was launched against American radicals like socialists, anarchists, feminists and others who displeased Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Wilson’s top man in the Justice Department. Though Wilson had touted America’s entry into World War I as an effort to “make the world safe for democracy,” during the postwar Red Scare, democracy was in peril right here in America.

The “Palmer Raids” of the Wilson era resulted in the jailing and deportation of thousands of political dissidents in a nation that claims to be the land of the free. Historian Frederick Lewis Allen called the 1920 Red Scare hysteria “a new record in American history for executive transgression of individual constitutional rights.” Palmer just sneered that “short-haired women and long-haired men are making trouble.” His “Palmer Raids” were eagerly assisted by a young J. Edgar Hoover, who would later become head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Red Scare mentality would continue during the White House terms of Wilson’s three Republican successors — Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Under Hoover’s administration, military veterans were routed from Washington by Army troops using clubs, tanks and tear gas during a Depression-era “Bonus Army” protest in the nation’s capital. Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton were among Hoover’s top military brass who led the clampdown against the ragtag rebels of the Bonus Army in 1932.

During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, signed Executive Order 9066 mandating the forced removal and imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in West Coast states fearful of a post-Pearl Harbor attack on the U.S. mainland by the Empire of Japan. More than 100,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up and spirited away from their farms and businesses and placed in prison camps in a nation that claimed to be waging a war for freedom. Both Democrats and Republicans shared the blame for the World War II concentration camps on American soil. Democrat Roosevelt signed the order and Republican Gov. Earl Warren of California — who later became chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court — pushed the policy of imprisonment based on race.

After World War II, the White House administrations of Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Dwight Eisenhower were mired in the political witch hunts pushed by Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. During the 1960s and 1970s, presidents of both political parties pushed government surveillance of American dissidents protesting the Vietnam War. At the same time, both Republicans and Democrats backed the draconian “Drug War” which has ravaged the Bill of Rights and cost taxpayers billions of dollars over a span of decades.

The New York Times was correct on June 7 in an editorial titled “President Obama’s Dragnet,” which said that the Obama administration’s use of Patriot Act provisions enacted during the GOP regime of President George W. Bush “repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.” Today, presidents of both political parties have the power to spy on citizens at home and wage war abroad using powers such as the Patriot Act, which was passed by both political parties in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

With both political parties so willing to target an often complacent and compliant populace, it is time for all Americans to remember the wise words of African-American author Ida Wells: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

• Ed Tant has been an Athens columnist since 1974. For more, see his website, www.edtant.com.